[Qt-interest] Qt on Android

[Jason H]

My gut feeling is "not hard" though I would expect more effort to be spent on QtMobility. I've ported drawing APIs and its never that hard, though I've not done Qt, but how many ways can you draw a line or fill a rectangle? The good thing about Qt is it has a raster engine, so I would expect the real work is in getting it properly accelerated.

I would also like to direct your attention to this post: http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/10/02/introducing-new-port-of-qt-to-your-favourite-platform/

I would actually be interested in doing the ports to iPhone or Android, but I have zero, 0, naught time to spend on it. Perhaps if I were paid in such a way to supplant my current 9-5er.... But until then it'll have to come from the community, or the trolls at Nokia. I do believe there is a git repo for iPhone started...http://gitorious.org/+qt-iphone





----- Original Message ----
From: Josh <jnfo-c at grauman.com>
To: qt-interest at trolltech.com
Sent: Tue, October 27, 2009 11:29:24 AM
Subject: Re: [Qt-interest] Qt on Android

Thanks all for chiming in on this.

In summary I have a couple questions.

Given that Android has the NDK, how hard would it be to port Qt to Android? From reading their docs I doubt it has framebuffer support and doesn't have X, and probably doesn't have all the libraries needed (but it does come with libc, libm, libz, and a cross-compiler).

Is it likely that anyone would do a port? It sounds like from Thiago's post that at least he sees it would be benefitial for Nokia. Whether other people in Nokia see it that way I don't know. If Nokia is not opposed to having a port out there, is it possible a port will be done at some point? Why aren't they pursuing it now, is it because Android doesn't have enough market share?

Could someone comment on whether the following post is based upon something I don't see. While it is encouraging that the 1.6 NDK opens up more, you still need to use the VM for the actual graphics, which seems to me as the hard part.?

http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/4070

Anyway, those are my thoughts.

Josh

> Em Segunda-feira 26 Outubro 2009, às 17:21:02, você escreveu:
>> Well, that'd be rather short sighted. Given that Nokia makes devices, then
>>  having same same apps across the devices in the industry  doesn't hurt,
>>  since iPhone has the most apps and the best apps. Anything Nokia and
>>  Google can do to erode that market share is good for the both of them.
>>  Supporting Qt on iPhone, Nokia, and Android devices would only ensure that
>>  the user can move to different handsets and expect the same softwares.
>>  What this also does, is get more developers using Qt because I can target
>>  everything (but RIM, Palm, porting to RIM, Palm not being discussed). Now,
>>  Qt is free so there's no profit there, but what this does is bring
>>  developers into supporting Nokia phones, if they had not planned to
>>  already. And I *want* to use Qt so I can address the three biggest players
>>  all at the same time. This also keeps Nokia from falling behind. Given
>>  that Nokia's market share is falling, they don't want to paint themselves
>>  into a corner.
>> 
>> Also, as the line between phones, MIDs, tablets etc, blurs, habing able to
>>  have the same app on your phone as a netbook would be a good thing as
>>  well. But Qt will scale up to the PC too. Learning one tool for all phones
>>  and PCs will ensure its success. Nokia could then use the developers it
>>  captures and lure them into supporting Nokia as a first-class platform.
>>  Which would really benefit Nokia phones.
> 
> You're basically quoting my presentation at Dev Days about Convergence (except
> the part about Android and iPhone ports). I was making the case about using Qt
> to cross any kind of device boundary: from desktop PCs to laptops to MIDs and
> tablets to mobiles. And also about using the web where it makes sense.
> 
> But I'd like to point out that you forgot one of the three biggest players in
> the list above: Windows Mobile. It's still larger than Android and Qt supports
> it.
> 
>